Where I Want to Move to

I want to move. But I can't
decide where to, for there are problems in
my environment, and they seem universal.

There is Death.

There is Entropy, the downhill slope
upon which Death sets his house.
Most universes have entropy, because
its preconditions are few.
You need Places.
You need Things, to fit into the places.
You need Numbers, to count the arrangements
of the things in the places.
You need Identity, to let one thing
differ from another thing so that
there is more than one arrangement to count.
You need Discernment, so that when your elbow catches
on the door edge, you drop a tray of
biscuits and coffee all over the carpet,
and four of the biscuits roll under the sofa,
you can realise that there
are wrong arrangements as well as right arrangements.
And you need Time, so that the number of
wrong arrangements can grow, and grow, and grow.

There is Regret, which I mention only
because it makes entropy more poignant.

There is Kinetics; and there are his children Viscosity,
Turbulence, and Friction. If entropy
is why things happen that shouldn't,
kinetics is why they don't happen
fast enough. Entropy is peeling
potatoes in the sink and losing your
wedding ring down the plughole. Kinetics
is when, no matter how hard you
rinse the potato dirt down the plughole,
it swirls round and round in a thousand
tiny eddies a centimetre from the rim.
The balance
between entropy and kinetics is not well
tuned.

There is Containment; and
hence there is Insertion. Some regions of the
Universe accomplish insertion with ease.
Ask Java to put an int into an Integer,
a character into a String, or an
instance into a Vector. The int never snags
on a bit poking out from the Integer,
the character slides into the String like a square peg
into a square hole, and the instance never
hits the Vector askew, drops onto the motherboard, and
bursts. But just ask the Universe to throw another used
teabag into your bin. It hits the wall
and leaves brown smears; or
comes apart and scatters wet tea all over
over the floor; or catches the side of the bin,
slithers, and ends up inside the dog.
Which then decides for the first
time ever that it has eaten enough stuff that
isn't dogfood, and throws up on your toes.

Because there is Insertion,
there are Portals, which are
transition regions through which
we insert things and
causal influences. But the Universe enjoys
propagating
things and causal influences
into places where they don't belong;
and hence we have Leakage. BP's oil leaks
into the Gulf of Mexico; Eyjafjallajökull's
ash leaks into aeroplane engines;
an aside about bigots leaks from Gordon
Brown into his microphone and costs him
the Election.
Containment and leakage partner
one another like kinetics and entropy, and
their balance is as badly tuned.

There is Inexplicability: and there is his son
Too Many String Theorists. And his other son,
Too Many Terry
Pratchett Jokes About "Quantum".

There is Potential Energy,
I pant, as I jog up
Headington
Hill until the sweat in my eyes makes me
stumble into the path
of 300 American tourists, bottoms
bigger than their camera cases, misdirected
by some wag of a local in response to their
leader's "Can you tell me the way to
the University?" I don't understand why American
tourists don't understand that the University
is not a Place. But what I really don't understood
is potential energy. At the bottom of the
hill, I lack it. At the top of the hill, I have it.
And after so much effort, I want to keep it: perhaps to
store it in a laptop battery, but at least, not to lose it
all again
when
I run downhill to the city centre.
But I can't. I have reduced my muscles to
twanging shreds in creating ½mgh of
potential energy; but despite all that
agony, I can't use the result.
Is it a mere accounting trick
that measures the depth of
a dimple in the space-time
continuum, one some extra-dimensional
giant could smooth out at the touch of the tip
of an extra-dimensional tentacle? Is
it some subtle quantum relationship between my atoms
and the Headington Hill gravitons? And if so,
how, given that I went on my run yesterday, and
those light-speeding gravitons
are now sleeting past Voyager 1?
It is terribly aggravating, this potential energy: something
you work so hard to make, but then can never use.

There are American Tourists.
Most universes will have American tourists, because
their preconditions are few.
You need Things.
You need Time, so that the things can become
old and thereby quaint.
And you need Light, so that there can exist cameras.
Actually, cosmologists recently calculated that the
Universe,
regardless of its shape and the
amount of dark energy it holds, will not
expand for ever. Instead, it will collapse
into a Big Crunch because of
the gravitational
attraction between the bazillions of
American tourists dispersed throughout it while
taking photos of Halley's Comet and
quaint old horsehead nebulae.
To prevent the collapse,
it turns out, we shall need to embed the
space-time continuum in a flat N-dimensional
space, then poke the tourists out through holes in
the continuum's hypersurface, tethering them just outside.
Their
gravitational attraction will pull the hypersurface
taut and stop it falling in on itself.

There is Curvature. You find a lot of this
in the continuum, as well as around certain tourists,
but that's not my
topic here.
Curvature lets more stuff fit into
a place than otherwise could,
but the fit is never perfect. This is
immediately understood by anyone who has
tried to iron pleats in trousers,
cover a book in sticky-back plastic, or edit
away a bug. You push down a bulge, and it
pops up elsewhere.

And there is Frustration, with his children
Kick The Dog, Slam The Door, and Oh Go On Then
Just One More Pint Please Barman. Because the
Universe is not well tuned and it is not user-friendly.
As Terry Pratchett's Incas realised
in one of his novels, if you believe in a Creator, the only appropriate
prayer is a plainchant whinge.
Indeed, if I were reviewing for Which Universe?
magazine, I would be impolite. Look at the space-time
metric. Why so complicated? One can just imagine Length, Breadth and
Height mooching around in the playground while they taunt Time:

Plainly, virtual reality is the only solution: a
virtual universe which doesn't burden you with stupidities
such as friction, tooth decay, and the need to traverse
all the intervening points when moving from A to B.
But simulations cost money; indeed,
there's a Greg Egan science-fiction novel whose protagonist,
imprisoned in a virtual world by a real version
of himself, takes a long long shower
merely so he can make his captor pay for
an hour of gratuitous and expensive turbulent-flow hydrodynamics
calculations.
And with my income nuked by the recession, the
only place I could afford would be some low-rent
VR ghetto so low-res that I'd waddle around
like a Space Invader. That would not
impress the 72 simulated virgins with whom I hope
to pass the simulated nights of the rest of my
simulated life.

To this, science fiction has an answer. You "compuform" the
Universe, turning all its contents into
clever matter that's optimised for computation and is
programmatically malleable enough
to satisfy your every whim, rather than
the stupid matter currently surrounding me that
merely sits on the Periodic Table idly spinning
its electrons. We don't need cows; tear them down and replace
by programmable cows that moo
and defecate, but that also dispense butterscotch-fudge
milk and jump around the Moon.
We don't need beans; tear them down and
replace by programmable beans that make
excellent soup and bright-bean salad, but that also give you adventure
by growing into huge great beanstalks with
magic harps and golden-egg geese
at the top. We don't need David Cameron; tear him
down and replace by a programmable Cameron that smiles
and waves and makes coalitions, but that also
has sympathy for the kids affected by his abolishing the plans
to rebuild aging schools.
We don't need Linux; tear it down
and replace by a programmable Linux where all the
commands make sense because each command uses
the same letter for an option as all the other commands
with options that do the same thing. (Now that is
fantasy.)

And in such a universe, malleable with computation, I could live the
bizarre unlogic of A. E. van Vogt's Null-A. I could journey to the far
side of
time with Don A. Stuart, project myself down into
the two-dimensional worlds of A. Square's
Flatland and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time,
hurtle through the bloodstream in a midget submarine with Raquel Welch,
or struggle free from Hell with Larry Niven
and Jerry Pournelle. But then, I realise, the current Universe also
holds wonderful things. There's a white patch
of carbon monoxide frost the Hubble sees on Pluto,
and snails with three-layer armoured shells living round
vents that gush boiling, acidic, metal-loaded
water
on Earth's sea floor: the snails' outer shells
stop acid dissolving the chalky
inner shell,
contain iron pyrites, and crack under impact to
absorb force from the claws of attacking crabs.
There's
a forest flower pollinated by
bluebottles and described as smelling worse than
any buffalo carcass in an advanced stage of decomposition, and a
a Jupiter-sized planet which the sun it orbits once per
day
has stretched into a rugby ball. The planet is leaking a cloudy
trail into the sun, and will eventually be consumed.
There's a four light-year
high pillar of dust and hydrogen, and in it, solar-system sized
globules of denser gas. Prise one open, and inside
you may find a new star. It seems a shame to
erase over all this wonderful history with computronium. Even for a
hurtle with Raquel Welch.

So my dream is to declare the current Universe
a museum, appoint myself curator,
and live in a flat above it. Or more precisely, in a pocket
universe next door to it. Here's how to make one, explained in simple
language from Experiment Number 45 in
The Boy's Book Of 101
Experiments With Space-Time:

How to Make a Pocket Universe

Find an unused region of space-time within your current
universe. To avoid gravitational-wave damage, clear the vicinity of
sentient beings, also
Eiffel Towers and other valuable artefacts.
Scratch a bubble of false vacuum, inflaming it
and raising a pimple of new space-time. The pimple
will first inflate to a pample — like
a pimple but bigger — before
ballooning out faster than the fabric
around it can stretch, thereby getting rucked up
into the void where it will coalesce
into a brand-new continuum.
Once this is large enough, pinch its neck
and pull taut to make a wormhole link with your current
universe.
For best results, make the new universe's timebase
several million times faster than the old. That
way, you can watch civilisations rise and fall in
a day, and evolve alien super-slaves who will
solve immortality and fix all the bugs in your
spreadsheets. (See under
Microcosmic God Strategy.)
If you
intend to move into this universe,
command your super-slaves to invent super-computers and
virtual reality.
Alternatively, and
more safely because not subject to power cuts,
seed its laws of physics and geometry
to give a real environment that you'd feel
comfortable in. We
recommend two perpendicular time dimensions (so you can have
your cake and eat it), plus a topology
in which every point neighbours every other. It
saves petrol.

But then, as I padlock the wormhole entrance
behind me and stride down the link
to curate today's curiosities — 2,731 new species of beetle,
a supernova with rings round it, a photosynthetic
gallium-arsenide window fish from the germanium seas of the superheated
planet Uctor,
and a human meme-virus that replicates
only in rap musicians —
I recall that quaint places
are popular places. And I seem to hear, thundering
up the wormhole link towards me,
three hundred billion American tourists.
"Can you tell me the way to the Universe, Sir?
Oh please, tell me the way to the Universe!"